Daily news and top headlines for broadband communications engineering and design professionals

Time Warner Cable CEO Rob Marcus and DirecTV CEO Mike White are the envy of Dr. Evil. Marcus, who has been on the job for 11 months, and White are poised to cash in for considerably more than Dr. Evil’s $1 million dollar plan to ransom the world.

Amazon announced that its Fire TV Stick has started shipping today, and said that the stick was its fastest selling Amazon device ever. But it looks as though you’ll have to wait until after the holidays to get your hands on one. Last month Amazon announced it was taking on Chromecast and Roku, among others, with its Fire TV Stick, which provides instant access to movies, TV shows, music, photos, apps, and games.

If the FCC were to attempt to reclassify broadband as a communications service under Title II, the industry will immediately sue to block the move, AT&T Randall Stephenson vowed. Furthermore, communications companies will stop investing in their networks.

It’s not exactly “cats living with dogs,” but the needle for enabling TV Everywhere services may have budged a fraction with the news that Google and Apple will allow purchased Disney movies to be viewed on each other’s platforms.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler may drop attempts at Title II reclassification, but in exchange will approve the Comcast / Time Warner Cable and AT&T / DirecTV mergers only with conditions that will bar them from engaging in paid prioritization. It's a win for MVPDs, but will they accept it?

Comcast has suffered several customer service related black eyes this year, including the overly zealous customer service rep that refused to cancel a former subscriber’s service and the allegation that the nation’s top cable operator got another disgruntled customer fired for complaining about his customer service. Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts took to the customer service stump during Thursday’s third quarter earnings call.

Programmers are holding up Comcast's acquisition of Time Warner Cable and AT&T's merger with DirecTV because they don’t want 108 people from learning the details of their contracts with their distributors. The argument should be blown up from underneath them with a well-placed metaphoric landmine.

“Why won't you give cable subscribers the same rights you're evidently giving broadband customers under the ‘CBS All Access’ plan?” Maybe because broadcasters will make much less money if viewers get to choose to pay for each of the major networks, because everyone expects that tens and tens of millions of viewers won’t.

“Gigabit” has a long way to go in terms of replacing the ubiquitous “cloud services” as the most used tech term, but there’s no doubt that, thanks to Google, Gigabit is now firmly entrenched in at least some consumers’ minds. AT&T, Grande Communications, Google Fiber, TDS Telecom, CenturyLink, Bright House Networks, Atlantic Broadband, and Cox Communications have, or plan to have 1-Gigabit services available.

Nielsen took another hit in credibility when it announced an unspecified technical error led to incorrect ratings for broadcast networks. Cable companies have been dissatisfied with Nielsen’s technical capabilities for reporting, specifically its delay in figuring out a way to measure multi-screen viewing.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association’s decision to rebrand The Cable Show as INTX, which stands for the Internet and Television Expo, was good fodder for informal conversations at last week’s SCTE Cable-Tec Expo in Denver. The NCTA announced that it was rebranding the show as INTX a week prior to Expo.

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler yesterday stated flatly that in too much of the U.S., there is no meaningful broadband competition, and that competitors are lagging behind public need. If enough people accept his propositions, Wheeler would then be able to justify reclassifying broadband as a communications service.

VIDEO: Senate Republicans are promoting the notion of making local stations a la carte on cable networks with a new YouTube video. The idea has the potential for gaining bipartisan support, even in this bitterly divided Congress, as a consumer-friendly and nearly pure free-market solution.

Speculators on Wall Street, eager for deals to move the market and frustrated by the collapse of talks between Sprint and T-Mobile, have been toying with the names of other companies who might step in and buy T-Mobile. Who's in a position to do it, though?

There are a lot of people insisting that 4K is the next big thing. 4K is demonstrably one of the technologies coming up next, and it is inevitable that 4K will eventually be big, but “next” and “big” both at the same time? You might want to adjust your expectations for the longer term.